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"...aw... come on...the worst you can do is look like a doofus who doesn't know Dick Nixon, but you're already doin' that, so whadaya got to lose??... come on , you'll have fun..."
That having been said by my "friends", my racing career was launched one Thursday evening in late spring a couple years back. Down to the bulkhead, sight unseen, for a taste of life in the fast lane at 5.5 knots I would go...
" Ya done much sailing?" came the only query from the grizzled veteran whose boat it probably was that I stared at in abject terror. If I answered that that was for him to know and me to find out, I probably wouldn't be asked back, so... I mumbled my few words of lame credentiality, and stayed low and out of sight. The boat was a sleek 27 feet of promise and sweet regret only truly appreciated once, at last, under way. After two trips to the head in ten minutes before departure I discovered that what's said about racehorses before a start is true. Casting off and moving out with the other million ( make that 35 ) boats heading for some line was unrehearsed chaos to my untrained eye. The utter nonchalance of the other crew instilled in me some calm before the building storm of pre-start "race-mode". Lines were run and re-run ; wind caprice and direction dissected, analyzed, snorted-at ; racing schemes and tactics pre-played and re-played ; the odd bit of gossip or bawdy story coughed-up to salve the building fever. All around ballet, with two and four ton beauties , was measured in carefully parceled-out near misses designed to psyche-up or -out one's own boat or another's , who could say? It was a 360 degree alien culture with language and customs barely hinted-at in any previous sailing experience I'd ever had.
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And was I ever immediately hooked! Maybe sex on roller skates in Times Square at six o'clock Friday Christmas Eve could come close, but not likely....
This "racing" thing began, maybe, as the antidote to the midlife express running roughshod over my small patch . I was looking for the fastest way possible to recover sailing knowledge that had rusted over long years of disuse, looking to recollect shards of personal expression and shared-etiquette that I may never have had, looking to connect with something that wouldn't stop demanding of me as I came back for more. Something of a renewal? The appeal to competence, the innumerable ways to contribute to team effort, the challenge to stout heart, sound head, and strong back held great promise right from the start. The level of intensity and immediacy of so tactile a world was apparent at the get-go. Nothing about this seemed like stamp collecting, or striking a golf ball; those are fine pursuits that open intricate worlds of their own. This racing thing is, however, about re-creating myself in a new image and in the company of ancient but newly found friends.
As our gun went off that first evening, in the midst of a core thrill that shot through me as few things have, I felt as though some essential good and true thing had come my way. Sailing slowly to nowhere at leisure, with no particular place to need to be or go, has more than a fond place in my future plans. But for now, though I'm still the lowest life-form on the boat we race, you gotta gimmee that racing thing....
Deck Ape
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